QQ Star partnered with the Discovery Channel to provide parents with a fully-immersive and fun learning experience on social media, designed to educate their children about nature and wildlife.
Objective:
During the pandemic, nutritional milk beverage QQ Star Milk's sales declined. QQ Star needed to maintain its position as the leading healthy growth beverage for children, while increasing brand awareness and driving sales.
Target Audience:
QQ Star Milk positions itself as a partner in childhood development, aiming to support parents on their child's educational and developmental journey.
Creative Strategy:
One of the pandemic's effects was to renew Chinese consumer interest in protecting the environment and natural wildlife. Yet, because of the pandemic, many families couldn't go out to zoos or travel to see nature for themselves.
QQ Star Milk saw this as the perfect opportunity to help support the 61 percent of parents concerned about educating their children, helping to step in and teach them about environmental protection and caring for animals while winning the trust and preference from parents in the process.
To tap into this opportunity, QQ Star Milk partnered with the hugely-popular Discovery Channel, which is well-known in China for its rich content on wildlife and nature. Through this partnership, QQ Star Milk created a fully immersive and fun learning experience for children that brought wild animals to life on mobile and social.
Context:
QQ Star Milk is a nutritional milk beverage for children, owned by China's No.1 dairy giant, Yili.
Overall Campaign Execution:
Creating a unique AR experience in partnership with NetEase, parents could scan limited edition bottles of QQ Star Milk to enter an immersive wildlife experience on their smartphones. Harnessing this interactive H5 page age, which contained Discovery Channel's unique content fused with CG technology, children could interact and take care of their favorite animals. The experience allowed children to do things like help an elephant take a bath and solve survival problems for lions, all the while being educated on the animals, as well as their unique habitat. In addition, parents and children could create uniquely sharable content for social, helping to demonstrate their personal commitment to protecting the environment.
Mobile Execution:
To encourage parents to buy a bottle and get scanning, QQ Star Milk created social challenges on China's hottest short-video and social apps, Douyin and Weibo, as well as custom filters and stickers that brought the animals to life on social media. This encouraged parents to share videos and photos of their children interacting with wildlife, going into the draw to win supply of QQ Star Milk. To promote this challenge, the brand partnered with China's top key opinion leaders (KOL)s, including Tianliang, Mao Xiaotong and Li Xiaoran, to create content that demonstrated how to protect the environment and wildlife.
To drive awareness of the partnership and environmental issues, the team launched its first-ever cross-continent live-stream series from the Kenyan grasslands, which was broadcasted on China's nine leading internet platforms on International Day for Biological Diversity, supplemented by TV commercials targeting mothers. Hot top banner ads and feed ads were leveraged to drive traffic to a special QQ Star Milk landing page set up for the event.
The campaign was a success with over 250 million limited edition bottles sold in just five weeks, and 2.4 million interactive AR scans resulting from those sales. The effort generated 4.3 billion impressions, with over six million livestream views, 70 million interactions and 270,000 Douyin challenge participants.
In addition, market share increased from 1.3 to 3.3 percent higher than competitors, brand preference grew 59.7 percent, and consumer recommendation increased by 144 percent. Finally, this campaign received support from government agencies, environmental NGOs, as well as China's official media, with countless netizens voicing their support for the initiative.
